Review in a Nutshell: A low-budget, live-action adaptation of a long-running action / science fiction manga series by Yoshiki Takaya, Guyver 2: Dark Hero is buoyed up by great rubber suit special effects and an absolutely crazy stunt team. Mike Dent of R5 Central guest stars in this episode.

Wow, I haven’t seen the Guyver movies in years. I only vaguely remember the first one, and most of those memories are of Mark Hamill. As a kid, I was used to Mark Hamill being the hero character because of Star Wars, and I remember specifically watching it because I assumed Hamill would be the titular character.

I like the second one a lot more, though again I haven’t seen it in years, so I’m looking forward to rediscovering it. I do wish you two had gone into some of the production a bit more. The production behind these two movies seem like they would be great stories to find out. Why on earth anyone would greenlight such oddball movies, based on Japanese properties, and containing the most ethnically diverse casts this side of a university program flier is beyond me. It seems like the perfect storm of B-level movie came together. All was right in the universe.

I imagine the movies got made because Steve Wang and his crew fronted the money themselves. On Guyver 2: Dark Hero, Wang is also listed as producer, as well as having one of the writing credits. What little information I’ve been able to glean suggests that Dark Hero was made for under a million dollars. They probably kept costs low by producing most of the make-up and suits in-house, and I understand the state of Utah offers all sorts of tax-break incentives to encourage film crews to shoot there. And this was back in a time period where “straight-to-video production” wasn’t synonymous with “we shot this for the Sci Fi Channel in Bulgaria”. A lot of daring stuff got made in the early nineties for home video.

Good call, and don’t get me wrong, Paul, I’m glad the movie got made. I ended up going to Wikipedia and checking it out. There’s not a lot of information there unfortunately, but it does mention Guyver 2 was made for $900,000 which is amazing to me! Granted I haven’t seen it in AGES, but I remember the special effects being fairly decent for a movie I’d never heard of and only saw because we got free cable (dad was a cable guy growing up, which I’m sure greatly contributed to my love of film).

I think one of the reasons why I’m drawn to these kinds of films is that it’s interesting how much they can do with such a little budget. Take even a revered, totally great film like Aliens. It was shot on a budget of only 18 million and only something like half a dozen alien costumes were made. But do to smart film crafting, it’d be almost impossible to tell that. This is one of the reasons why I loved Guyver and Guyver 2 as an adolescent. Incidentally, Guyver 2 can be found on iTunes for only $9.99. I might just acquire it thusly.

Also, I’m just a lowly listener (and only discovered your podcast last week!), but I’m eating up all the past episodes and LOVE them. I have a few suggestions for movies to cover, but I’m sure you get them all time. At any rate, great update and looking forward to me. Hopefully I’ll prove myself an intelligent listener.

Back when I discovered anime fandom (only 11 years ago), there was stuff in English which wasn’t the raunch that’s described in “Even a Monkey,” and which wasn’t intellectual sci-fi. I missed the eleventh generation tape trading era, the “video comics” in rental stores, and the time when CPM was a leader in the industry.

So yeah, I rented one of the Guyver OAVs and said “Meh.” I recall glancing at my library’s trade paperback of it and being unimpressed. Sorry, but it wasn’t relevant to my interests. I prefer fantasy series and cute stuff.

It’s sad that Steve Wang doesn’t get more opportunities to make feature films. He understands how to film action better than most, and has a lot of personal love for this type of genre. I read that him and Koichi Sakamoto are currently putting together an American version of Kamen Rider, which could be fun.

A couple of months ago I rented his very first film, Kung Fu Rascals. It’s incredibly low budget and goofy but the monsters are still up to Wang’s standards and you can see his style shine through.

On a somewhat related note, the Alpha Stunt team has made a film with Jonny Young Bosch(anime voice actor and Power Ranger) which looks to be in the same action vein as Guyver 2 and Drive. You can see the YouTube trailer here, and the description has a link to the full movie download as well. This may unfortunately be the only way to see it because they’ve been having trouble finding a distributor: